r together. Her Cousin
Flora had evidently pondered the difficult question of a manner with
Ruth and was pursuing it scrupulously. Her plan was clearly indicated in
her manner. She would seem to be acting as if nothing had happened and
yet at the same time made it plain that she in no sense countenanced the
person to whom she was being kind. Her manner was that most dismal of
all things--a punctilious kindliness.

This same Cousin Flora, now an anaemic woman of forty-five, had not
always been exclusively concerned with propriety. Ruth could remember
Cousin Flora's love affair, which had so greatly disturbed the members
of the family, and which, to save their own pride, they had thwarted.
Cousin Flora had had the misfortune to fall in love with a man quite
outside the social sphere of the Copelands and the Hollands. He was a
young laboring man whom she knew through the social affairs of the
church. He had the presumption to fall in love with her. She had not had
love before, being less generously endowed in other respects than with
social position in Freeport. There had been a brief, mad time when
Cousin Flora had seemed to find love greater than exclusiveness. But the
undesirable affair was frustrated by a family whose democracy did not
extend beyond a working together for the good of the Lord, and Cousin
Flora was, as Ruth remembered their saying with satisfaction, saved.
Looking at her now Ruth wondered if there ever came times when she
regretted having been saved.

She tried to make the most of all those little things that came into her
mind just because this homecoming was so desolate a thing to be left
alone with. She had many times lived through a homecoming. And when she
had thought of coming home she had always, in spite of it all, thought
of things as much the same. And now even she and Ted were strange with
each other; it was Ted the little boy she knew; it was hard all at once
to bridge years in which they had not shared experiences.

It was the house itself seemed really to take her in. When she got her
first sight of it all the things in between just rolled away. She was
back. What moved her first was not that things had changed but that they
were so much the same--the gate, the walk up to the house, the big tree,
the steps of the porch; as she went up the walk there was the real
feeling of coming home.

Then they stepped up on the porch--and her mother was not there to open
the door for her; she knew t